Category: Historical (born 1920 or before)

Bella Abzug
Bella Abzug


Bella Abzug served as a United States representative from 1971-1977, representing New York's 19th district (1971-1973) and New York's 20th district (1973-1977). Abzug was born July 24, 1920, and grew up in New York's Bronx neighborhood. She received an A.B. from Hunter College in 1942 and then entered Columbia University Law School. She practiced law for 25 years, working on labor and tenants' rights, civil rights and liberties cases. In the 1960's, Abzug cofounded Women Strike for Peace, a group that protested the nuclear arms race and later the American […]
Sadie Lewis Adams
Sadie Lewis Adams


Sadie Lewis Adams was a teacher, suffragist and clubwoman. Adams was born on February 24, 1872, in Staunton, Virginia. She earned a teaching certificate from Hartshorn Memorial College in Richmond, and taught in the Staunton Public School system until her marriage in 1892. In 1910, Adams and her husband moved to Chicago, Illinois. She became active in volunteer activities and women's clubs, including the Alpha Suffrage Club, the first African American suffrage organization in Chicago. After Illinois granted women the right to vote in local elections in 1914, Adams was […]
Jane Addams
Jane Addams


Jane Addams was a settlement social worker, public philosopher, sociologist, author, and leader in women's suffrage and world peace. She was the second woman and the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1931, and is recognized as the founder of the social work profession in the United States. Addams was born on September 6, 1860, in Cedarville, Illinois. Her father, John Addams, was a founding member of the Illinois Republican Party and served as an Illinois State Senator from 1855 to 1870. He was friends […]
Nina Evans Allender
Nina Evans Allender


Nina Evans Allender was a political cartoonist and suffragist. She served as the official cartoonist for Alice Paul’s National Woman’s Party. Allender was born in Auburn, Kansas, in 1872. Her mother, Eva, left her father and moved to Washington, D.C. with Nina and her sister to work at the Department of the Interior. Allender married an Englishman as a young woman, but he abandoned her after a short while. She then took a job at the Treasury Department and pursued art more seriously. She studied art at the Corcoran School […]
Naomi Bowman Talbert Anderson
Naomi Bowman Talbert Anderson


Naomi Bowman Talbert Anderson was a poet, writer and public speaker who often gave speeches on the experience of Black women and their right to vote. She spoke about the issues of Black women but was an advocate for all genders and races. She worked alongside suffragists to campaign for the first woman’s suffrage referendum. Anderson was born on March 1, 1843, in Michigan City, Indiana, to one of two Black families in the community. At age 12, she was noticed for her poetic talent and was invited to attend […]
Susan B. Anthony
Susan B. Anthony


Susan B. Anthony was born on February 15, 1820, in Adams, Massachusetts. She was brought up in a Quaker family with long activist traditions. After teaching for fifteen years, she became active in temperance. Because she was a woman, she was not allowed to speak at temperance rallies. This experience, and her acquaintance with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, led her to join the women's rights movement in 1852. Soon after she dedicated her life to women's suffrage. After they moved to Rochester in 1845, members of the Anthony family were active […]
Annie Arniel
Annie Arniel


Annie Arniel was a suffragist, women's rights advocate, and member of the Silent Sentinels who picketed the White House in 1917. Arniel was born in May 1873 in Harrington, Delaware. She married in 1891 and was widowed in 1910, thereafter supporting herself and her daughter as a factory worker. In 1914, Arniel and her daughter participated in a Washington, D.C., suffrage parade. The same year, she served as a delegate for the Delaware Equal Suffrage Association to the National American Woman Suffrage Association's annual convention. In 1915, she served as […]
Ella Baker
Ella Baker


Ella Josephine Baker was a civil rights activist whose organizational, behind-the-scenes work made her one of the most important figures in the Civil Rights Movement. She emphasized the importance of a grassroots approach over charismatic leadership within the movement. Baker was born on December 13, 1903, in Norfolk, Virginia, and grew up in North Carolina. After graduating from Shaw University in 1927, she moved to New York. In 1931, while working as an editorial assistant at the Negro National News, Baker joined the Young Negroes Cooperative League and soon became […]
Emily Greene Balch
Emily Greene Balch


Emily Greene Balch was an American sociologist, political scientist and economist, and a leader in the women’s peace movement. She received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1946 jointly with John Raleigh Mott for her work with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). Blach was born January 8, 1867, in Jamaica Plain, now part of Boston, Massachusetts. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1889, a member of the first graduating class there. She completed an independent study in sociology from 1889-1890, used a fellowship from Bryn […]
Daisy Bates
Daisy Bates


Daisy Lee Gatson Bates was a civil rights activist and newspaper publisher who played a leading role in the Little Rock Integration Crisis of 1957. Bates was born on November 11, 1914, in Huttig, Arkansas. She and her husband, Lucious Christopher (L. C.) Bates, started the weekly newspaper, the Arkansas State Press, in 1941, one of the only African American newspapers solely dedicated to the Civil Rights Movement. Bates was elected president of the Arkansas chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1952. After the […]